This post first appeared in XBRL Blog XBRL deployment is a long river, and you need to keep that in mind regardless if you’re focussed on the (downstream) regulatory filing and analysing components or the (upstream) ERP integration and general ledger design. I’ve put together a list that takes into account technical, accounting, filing and investor relations. The point is […]
The news du jour is that BHP Billiton has declined to pursue its offer for Rio Tinto. Whilst on the one hand the story has flummoxed the investor community, the back channel is that millions of pounds were spent consulting with the professionals who were drafting up the paperwork, dotting the i’s and twisting the fountain pen nibs. I quote […]
Institutional investors of British banks have got more powerful over the years, at the expense of the retail investor. This power has been somewhat diluted by the weighing in of government in the form of bailouts. Further evidence of executive compensation becoming the most scrutinised aspect of financial reporting is also revealed in the article, where majority investors expect to […]
This was originally published in Bizcommunity, October 20 2008 http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/18/29896.html Corporate transparency is the winner after every market correction – from the 1930’s New Deal laws through to King II and Sarbanes-Oxley. Being involved in your company’s investor relations/corporate affairs section, this will affect how you communicate to the markets and even internally. The rise of activist shareholders and government […]
Ofttimes, people come up to me and say “please stop taking pictures” or “get off my lawn”. Othertimes, I talk to them about communicating to their stakeholders in an online fashion. There are many tools to accomplish this. The variety becomes a problem because clients may see it as a shopping list. The real issue is the usability. If you […]
I find the standard way of explaining XBRL using the barcode analogy doesn’t quite work for me. A barcode is a complex display with arguably more information encoded on that “tag” than exists for the object label itself. I think of financial statements locked in a PDF or book as a flock of birds an ornithologist is studying. They all […]
Dealstream Securities traded derivatives on the JSE Securities Exchange, specialising in listed single stock futures and CFDs. Alleged problems with its trade in CFDs led to them running out of liquidity with its clearing memberand they were pulled off the markets a few days ago. Assuming that the investment/trading community is probably griping about this topic in the Bull Run […]
The US SEC (our JSE equivalent) announced on Tuesday late August that the format for financial statements to the regulator, Edgar, will be superseded by a format that has more in common with the social media tools today’s users have come to enjoy. You had to see the webcast (and followed the liveblog): The president-appointed chairman who oversees America’s $26-trillion […]
The SEC announced last week that it would make a decision in 2011 on whether adoption of IFRS is in the public interest and would benefit investors. SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, as part of his drive to make global sampling of financial statements easier, pointed out that there are many business languages in the world, and in most of these […]
I reckon that technology-ignorant clients are a double-edged sword. The Law states that whatever sophisticated concept you manage to run by them with no resistance, thou shalt be smitten with much rebuking about low-end things, eg: this content management tool doesn’t accept my MS Word tabs and indents! Shriek! I just want to print one piece of paper off this […]
This was always going to be a big thing: presence, alerts, IM, groups and whiteboarding. It seems its coming to pass with the ESME project, through SAP labs. .
Jack Dorsey Presents Twitter from biz stone on Vimeo. Found via Jayz.
A year ago saw me trying to explain microblogging (when the Twitter Fail Whale was but a guppy), after having got the blogging presentation finally right. The Twenty20 Cricket World Cup was the rage, and I simply joined the dots: Twenty20 cricket is to 50-over cricket as Twitter is to blogging. It’s shorter, more intense and has engagement value. Not […]
In a survey conducted by Agoracom, of 850+ Canadian retail investors, the following findings were made : 81% of Investors Prefer Small-Cap Resource Companies over Large-Cap. 48.4% of Investors were most Bullish on Gold compared to other minerals and metals. 73% of Investors Conduct the Majority of their Research (75%+) into New Stocks Online. This is a dramatic 18.65% increase […]
I recently had the need to get information on Vignette (story server) in a hurry, and followed a certain methodology which is no doubt common to many. In order: Google Vignette’s site Wikipedia Phone dev friends Twitter Post a question on LinkedIn You could seperate the first 3 into old-style information harvesting (even wikipedia), #4 into common sense, and #5 […]
This first appeared in Techleader, June 2008 I’m grateful for search engines, but I still find it hard to accept living with Dead Text. Letters and figures on a screen. Not able to be mined, found, unlocked, extrapolated into meaning. What irks me in particular is tables of figures, especially financial information, that you would have to re-key into excel […]
Good link via great chum Elan Lohmann. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft). This is a semantic follow on from a convo we had once at the Gourmet Garage, where scales lifted from my eyes about Google and advertising. This is an established industry, if you read Dorothy L Sayers you’ll see that advertising in the 1930s and the client-agency-paper relationship is wholly […]
This first appeared in TechLeader, June 2008 I have this credibility problem with cartoons where, when they regularly reach behind their heads/into their coats, they tend to whip out gadgets/weaponry that outweigh them and flaunt Newton One to Three. For storylines, its weak. But for concepts like storing terabytes of data and other objects off your local grid, its incredible. […]
Some think that loadshedding came at the right time, to force people to save power and start thinking along sustainable lines: perhaps even to get back to traditional ways of spending time together. The same has been bandied about about high petrol (gas) prices. Raise the price, get people to drive less (less carbon, less demand, build public transport); it […]
Comment unnecessary: more of a story here
Comment unnecessary: more of a story here
I’ve just put down a fascinating article in an old issue of IR Magazine, about the differences in IR language between the US and UK. The premise is that while language and verbage are 99% the same, meaning and emphasis is totally different. For example, “challenging” in plc terms may mean ‘dire’, or ‘SELL'; in the US that could translate […]
I was kindly invited by James Governor (aka Monkchips) of Redmonk, to participate in a pre-conference Wiki, OpenAccountability. James is hyper-passionate about sustainability and web2, and doesn’t mince words or dialectics; I foresee him turning his dab hand to shareholder activism in time. I posted there, thought it would fit here too… Corporate communication tends to follow a linear trail, […]
Shareholder activists are not parka-wearing, be-bearded, placard-waving activists. By definition, they need to own and control shares. Unfortunately, retail investors being what they are, also means they wont get much clout at the AGM. It helps if you’re a billionaire in charge of investment funds, and you aren’t happy the way that your investment is being managed. The mere whiff […]
The Public Investment Corporation (PIC) of South Africa released a PDF on its website on April 1, displaying how it voted at various AGMs. The PIC is tasked with investing the pension funds of government employees, and therefore tend to hold large chunks of equity in public companies. In fact, they hold over R700 billion assets under management, making them […]
This is verbatim: IR Firm Pushes Retail investor http://www.thefreelibrary.com/How+a+comprehensive+IR+program+pays+off:+an+investor+relations…-a0112360402 Has the recent runup in the stock market brought the individual investor, battered by years of losses, back into the market in a big way? Experts may be divided, but one sign that it has comes from the Financial Relations Board (FRB), a major public relations and investor relations firm. The […]
Consol Glass is a former listed company on the JSE bourse in South Africa. I wanted to see an annual report done for them for the 2006 financial year, and to my surprise found that I had to log in to view not only their archive of financial reports, but their investor press releases as well! Getting knowledge on who […]
I was digging through some old files and found my old blogger install file. I had an account on Geocities (Yahoo!) from 1998 and uploaded my CV to it, and then dabbled with blogger in 2000. I didn’t update it for many years and Yahoo! closed the account. Just for kicks and posterior analytics, here are my first blog posts. […]